There’s a particular kind of magic that happens when people who are repairing local economies find each other.
Not in an abstract, “let’s collaborate someday” kind of way — but in a real-time spark that produces something new.
At Neighborhood Economics, we’ve started to call that the place where solutions have babies.
From Libraries of Innovation to Living Exchange
Across the field, we’re seeing players create their own libraries of innovation. Brookings’ has Buy Back the Block. Impact Alpha’s has a Playbook. And there are others. Each is curating field-tested models of how communities repair and reinvest in themselves.
One of the entrepreneurs in our circle, Clark Harris, is building what he calls a Slide Exchange — a single, high-leverage image that distills an innovation into something others can immediately use.
But what’s happening at Neighborhood Economics isn’t just cataloging. It’s cross-pollination.
The Hallway Moment: $65,000 of Shared Genius
At one of our gatherings, Sam Centellas of CDFI Friendly South Bend was describing his approach to appraisal discrimination. That’s the bias that keeps redlined neighborhoods from closing deals on affordable homes. Sam has developed an Alternative Equity model for a revolving equity line built between a CDFI and a credit union.
Sitting nearby was co-panelist Aisha Weeks from the Dearfield Fund, known for $40K down-payment support for first-time homeowners.
In a few minutes of conversation, the leaders realized something remarkable: By combining their tools, which would require very little coordination, they could reduce the cost to get families into a $250,000 (more-than-)affordable home by about $65,000. That’s a savings of 26%.
This innovation stack didn’t come about from a proposal or a pitch deck. It was born in a curated space designed for chance encounters with purpose.
That’s what we mean by “solutions having babies.”
Moving Beyond the Halloween Store
Neighborhood Economics is growing beyond being an event, following the once- or twice-yearly pop-up Halloween store model.
We’re also helping to build an ongoing ecosystem of exchange—where practitioners, funders, and storytellers stay in the same orbit long enough for ideas to influence and improve one another.
On November 3, we hosted a working session by practitioners on how to unlock the often frozen loss reserves held by Community Development Finance Institutions. CDFIs are the capillary system for an economy that works for all. But some experts say they have become too risk averse.
Practitioners who have addressed that problem with reliable injections of philanthropic capital are discovering that more loans can get completed in marginalized and redlined neighborhoods. We are gathering those innovators and will work to spread their various innovations through our newsletter and an emerging innovations exchange.